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LONDON — For the past year, Stuart Adams has been fasting twice a week. While he has lost 15 pounds, the real reason he’s depriving himself is to stave off brain disorders including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“There’s a virulent strain of madness running through my family, and I reckoned my chances of going down that route were pretty high,” said Adams, 43, a freelance translator and interpreter in London who learned of a possible link between Alzheimer’s and diet while watching a BBC documentary last year. “Anything that could help with that was of great interest.”

Fasting two or more days a week is catching on as people seek ways to avoid a range of ailments linked to obesity from dementia to cancer.

Building on findings in studies of mice by the U.S. National Institute of Aging, researchers are planning the first studies in humans of fasting’s potential to stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s. Because there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, which afflicts more than 35 million people, any possibility of prevention holds huge potential.

Adams was inspired to try the diet last year after the BBC documentary called Eat, Fast & Live Longer cited a study in mice that suggested intermittent fasting could delay the onset of cognitive disorders.

The study was led by Mark Mattson, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and senior investigator at the National Institute of Aging. Mattson is planning a new project to measure how fasting twice a week for two months affects human brain function and early signs of Alzheimer’s.

Some experts have doubts.

“This is part of a never-ending carousel of diet books,” said Kelly Brownell, former director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University and now dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

“Some people will go on it, and because they’re cutting their calories, they will be successful,” Brownell said. “There will be some buzz, and then the diet will go away, never to be heard of again.”

While research on fasting diets and dementia still has a long way to go, the early evidence is promising.

The mouse study led by Mattson found that intermittent fasting might have protected the function of brain cells, even if it didn’t reduce levels of plaque and tangles that typically are signs of Alzheimer’s.